Forum: our Bits & Pixels blog

Welcome to the visualization forum! Here we share news about ARTEMiS and notes on our process of creating visualizations. All posts are “tagged” by relevant topics (see left sidebar). You are welcome to contact us to suggest other discussions.

This post describes Maya rendering techniques we have used to create a mountain range, with pre-glacial, V-shaped valleys, for our Glacial Structures animation. Maya has some fun (and useful) preset render settings for quick renders. To find them, right-click on a new render layer, and then attributes: ..and then open up one of the many presets: ambient occlusion, luminance depth or normal map: Maya’s normal map preset changes the color of the object, depending on the angle between each point on the surface (its normal) and the position of the camera. Different facing ratios between object surfaces and the camera are…

At the Gordon Research Conference on Visualization in Science and Education in Rhode Island, July 7-12, team leader Violeta Ivanova presented a poster titled “Visualization in Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education: Curriculum Development, Student Portfolios, and Lessons Learned from a New Undergraduate Subject at MIT.” The highlight of the presentation were the live demos of science animations created by MIT undergraduate students in Violeta’s class. Several of these animations are featured in our Student Films channel on vimeo.

Artwork by ARTEMiS’ visual artist Krista Shapton is on today’s cover of Science magazine! For this work, which she did just prior to joining the ARTEMiS team at MIT, Krista collaborated with researchers at Harvard Medical School.